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Boost Engagement with Pear Deck

Pear Deck is a powerful yet user-friendly platform designed specifically for educators to create captivating and interactive lessons. Its versatility makes it an invaluable asset, particularly for elementary school teachers seeking to create a stimulating and inclusive learning environment. In today’s fast-paced educational landscape, engaging students in the classroom can often be a challenging task. Traditional teaching methods sometimes struggle to captivate young minds and maintain their focus. However, in this digital age, innovative tools like Pear Deck have emerged as a game-changer, transforming the learning experience by making it more interactive, dynamic, and enjoyable. PearDeck is a Google Slides...

Quick Videos with Apple Clips

Videos don’t need to be full-blown edited masterpieces. We have a great app on all iPads called Clips which allows you to string together video segments to make short movies. The added bonus is that there are pre-made animations and annotations students can use to spruce up the video even more. 🍎 Elkhart Teachers: Find the App on your Self-service app If you’ve never tried the app or seen a video, here’s an example: Why not use iMovie? The main benefit of Clips is that the videos are easy. You don’t fuss with a timeline-based editor to make changes. You...

Mystery Read Alouds

One unique twist on this well liked read aloud activity is to incorporate a mystery reader into your routine. Just like you are missing your students faces, they are missing the faces of all the teachers and staff that they used to see every week. Here is a great way to combine read aloud books, a fun mystery, and the sharing of love.

Supporting Independent Reading with Book Talks

Holding kids accountable for their reading at home (or even in class) is always a challenge. Kids are getting better and better at “fake reading” and are often unfocused. Even having parents sign a piece of paper saying their child read for 20 minutes is unreliable. Having children record themselves talking about their reading can be a new way of holding kids accountable for their reading. Book Talks Using the Camera It’s important to make sure the book or passage your student intends to read is at their independent reading level. This especially true given that we’re all working at...

Using Canvas Modules as Checklists for Students

Now, more than ever, it’s important that we encourage executive functioning in our students. Thankfully, Canvas has a number of features that can help facilitate these skills. For many people, a “to do list” is an effective way to stay on task and the reward of crossing items off our to do list is intrinsic. Canvas automatically generates a to do list for students based on what items are due each day.  However, you can customize this for your students and allow them to check items off their list in just a few easy steps. Organize in Modules If you aren’t...

Setting Healthy Boundaries for Online Learning

As we wrap week one of being an online school, the biggest concern we’re hearing from teachers is that boundaries are much more difficult to define and keep. I’m going to touch on that tension and where it comes from and then give some practical tips you can use to set and maintain healthy boundaries for online teaching. The Conflict Working from home introduces a number of conflicting obligations to the work day. Prep and grading aside, our own kids are working at home, we have to contact students or parents individually, and we need to make sure we’re available...

Edit PDFs in Canvas Assignments

There are many ways to share information with students through Canvas.  One strategy that is easy and seamless is to allow students to annotate over documents in Canvas.  This allows students to open the document, annotate over it with text tools, and easily submit back to the assignment…no downloading, copying, sharing, or paper and pencil required! If you want to try this with your students, read on for instructions. Create the PDF The first step is turning any document you want to share into a PDF.  If the document is something you have created in Word or Google Docs, you can...

Using Seesaw as a Daily Journal

I assign a discussion questions daily for my students to answer in our “morning work” time before specials. The purpose is to get students writing, first thing in the morning, about different topics. I have gradually increased and expanded the expectations as we get further into the year, layering different skills as we go. Make sure you have capital letters and ending marks. Make sure to have at least 4 sentences Make sure to restate the question Add transitional words Add a conclusion By expanding the required elements slowly, I am able to help students improve each individual component rather than overwhelming...

Problem Solving While Working from Home

Our new reality has started and we’re in eLearning for the long haul! Fear not, though. Instructional Tech and Tech Services are here to help everyone. In this post, we’re going to look at some ways to manage problem solving while we all practice social distancing. If an issue arises during eLearning (and they will), we suggest using the following problem solving steps. Using these steps before going to a member of the instructional technology team or technology department helps ensure that we have enough time to handle the new issues that come up each day. Remember, your building technology ambassador is...

Free Upgrades for Digital Tools You Already Use

There are a lot of social media posts circulating out there promoting free tools to use during in e-learning. It’s important to note that any free service has to make its money somehow. This typically is by selling to parents after hours, offering premium services that entice teachers into paying for them, or getting people so hooked that they sell premium features to districts. With the massive shift to online learning right now companies are helping out teachers and families and making some of their paid features free. These free items are a temporary feature so keep that in mind...

Different Types of Videos Teachers Can Make for Their Students During Home Learning

While students are away we want to give them a sense of normalcy and routine where it make sense. Having a way for students and parents to hear and see their teacher is a great way to build lasting relationships and create more engaging and authentic learning experience. There are many different ways of using videos with your students while they are away. No matter what type of video you choose to make, remember to keep them short. Below are suggestions for ways to create and share different types of videos. Seesaw Recordings (elementary) Seesaw has a built in recorder...

Using Pages Templates with Elementary Students

We wanted to eliminate using multiple worksheets and add depth of knowledge to science and social studies assignments this year. Making templates in Pages is easy to do, so we took content and created templates for each activity that we could use with students in class. Why Use Templates in Pages? Interactive templates allow more opportunities for students to engage with the task. Students can be creative by adding photos, sounds, or even videos. Students are able to expand on ideas by linking websites found in research, linking to different areas of a longer document (ie, an interactive table of contents),...

Use Google Sheets to Quickly Translate Vocabulary Lists

If you teach Level 1 ENL students, one accommodation you can make is to provide English vocabulary alongside home-language translations. This helps students make mental connections to the new content in a context they already understand. If you need to quickly make a translation of a list of words, you can easily do this using a formula in a Google Sheet.  See this post on other helpful tips for your ENL students. Get Started Create a new Google Sheet in Drive. Type your vocabulary list in a column. In the Column B type =GOOGLETRANSLATE Google Translate will pop up as...